Our R&D Team has been hard at work refining and extending the functionality of our WinForms and WPF Diagram Control. As you'll read shortly, DevExpress Diagram v16.2 will ship with some high-impact new features. Before I describe the new capabilities of our Diagram Control, let me extend my deepest thanks to those of you who generously shared your suggestions with us.
New Diagram Item Template Designer for Visual Studio
v16.2 will ship with a brand new Template Designer for Visual Studio so you can create templates for data bound diagram items with absolute ease.
Improved Data Binding
With the aid of 2 new controllers, our WinForms & WPF Diagram Cont can now generate items based on a collection of data objects.
- OrgChartController - Creates an organizational chart from a hierarchical data source with self-referenced or nested data structures.
- DataBindingController - Creates graphs of any complexity.
Each controller includes the following features:
- Items and connectors are generated based on templates supplied by our Template Designer.
- You can generate and update items in code by handling corresponding events.
- Serialization: Items can be copied/pasted, saved and loaded preserving bound data.
- Undo/Redo support.
- Automatic layout type selection (Tree, Tip-Over Tree, Sugiyama or Circular).
Note that if your source collection is modified, you won't need to worry about keeping the diagram updated. The diagram will be updated automatically.
UX Enhancements - New Dock-based UI
Both our WinForms & WPF Diagram Control will now allow you to deliver a Visual Studio-inspired dock-based UX. This includes built-in support for auto-hide windows, splitters and dock hints.
New Diagram Layout Styles
v16.2 ships with three new diagram layouts: Circular, Compact Tree, Tip-Over Tree. We've also introduced new settings allowing you to configure item spacing, alignment, direction, etc.
UX Enhancements - Container Support
DevExpress Diagram now offers item containers so you can better organize information and create more readable diagrams. Container related features include:
- Ability to customize headers and paddings.
- Use built-in container shapes.
- Genereate custom container shapes.
- Apply themes and styles.
- Select containers from an integrated Ribbon gallery.
UX Enhancements - New Image Item
With this release, you can display bitmap images on the Diagram's surface and control the following options:
- Load images from a file or stream.
- Serialize images to XML as a file name or as raw data.
- Apply one of three individual stretch modes (stretch, uniform, uniform to fill).
- Rotate, scale and flip images.
Print Preview
This new feature speaks for itself...DevExpress Diagram now offers Print Preview support.
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If you're interested in learning more about DevExpress Diagram, feel free to email us at info@devexpress.com.